Beverly Hills Hotel has hosted countless celebrities in its Polo Lounge, rooms and bungalows during its 100 years. Despite its age, it's still in the pink.

When he stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the famously reclusive Howard Hughes would have roast beef sandwiches left for him in a crook of a tree, go on 2 a.m. treasure hunts for freshly baked pineapple upside-down cakes that were hidden on the grounds, and keep a phone booth inside his bungalow.

"They'd switch different booths in and out of different bungalows because he [Hughes] didn't want to go through the hotel operator," says producer Richard D. Zanuck, who was told about Hughes by his father, 20th Century Fox co-founder Darryl F. Zanuck, also a frequent visitor to the picturesque pink hotel.

Hughes was a regular at the hotel from 1942 until his death in 1976. His eccentricities are among countless stories that illustrate just how far the hotel was willing to go to sate the extravagant and sometimes clandestine appetites of its famous clientele — and why they continued to come back.

As the hotel turns 100 this month, it remains at the center of Hollywood's concept of itself, an idealized self-image in pink. And like the celebrities it serves, it has a public face and a private one.

If scandal has taken place inside its walls — and you can be sure that it has — the hotel isn't telling. It has slept with more Oscars, movie icons, rock gods and moneyed glitterati than just about any hotel on the planet, often colluding with the stars to deny a gossip-hungry public. And privacy, as everyone knows, can be a rarity in a town obsessed with the minutiae of celebrity life.

"Every memory I have of the place that I want to share, I wouldn't want to see in print," says famed "Chinatown"producer and former Paramount head of production Robert Evans, who got his start as an actor after being discovered lounging by the hotel's pool by actress Norma Shearer in 1956.

Situated on 12 rambling acres off Sunset Boulevard, the 208-room hotel was designed by Pasadena architect Elmer Grey as a lush Mediterranean hideaway with staircases appearing out of nowhere and slender walkways leading in lazy circles to tucked-away bungalows. The secluded entrances to the 23 bungalows make them ideal for secret rendezvous.

Homegrown Hollywood star Laura Dern grew up going to the hotel with her mother, Diane Ladd, and her godmother, Shelley Winters. As a child, she says, arriving there felt like "entering a birthday cake."

"The only time I ever saw Jimmy Stewart was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it meant the world to me," recalls Dern, who still has breakfast at the hotel's iconic Polo Lounge with director David Lynch every year on their birthdays.

"A friend of mine described it best," says the hotel's general manager, Ed Mady, while giving a tour of Bungalows 20 and 21, where Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand were said to have cheated on their spouses while filming "Let's Make Love" in 1960. "The Polo Lounge is like Hollywood's commissary."

If that's true, then the Beverly Hills Hotel pool is Hollywood's playground. Svend Petersen would know — beginning in 1959, he managed the pool for 43 years.

He remembers talking with Ingrid Bergman for hours; teaching Faye Dunaway to swim for her role in "Mommie Dearest"; being in awe of Princess Grace ("You didn't dare to say hello because she was so elegant"); and sneaking the Beatles (who were disguised in fake beards and oversized clothes) into an upper cabana in 1964, after they performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show," while a thousand kids screamed out front.

When Elizabeth Taylor was married toSen. John Warner in the late '70s, Petersen remembers her coming to the pool.

"She was very heavy, and bothered because she was so heavy, and women were walking by whispering about how she had let herself go," notes Petersen. "I couldn't take it anymore, and I said, 'Ms. Taylor, why don't you come with me. There's a cabana where you can relax by yourself and feel comfortable.'"

It was this kind of special attention that Petersen says earned him a kiss on the lips from Whitney Houston, another hotel regular. Longtime Polo Lounge manager Pepe De Anda fondly remembers Houston playing the piano for nearly two hours in the restaurant in front of a rapt — and surprised — audience.

The hotel's celebrity siren song continues to this day. On a recent weekend, Warren Beatty ate lunch in the Polo Lounge. Two weeks before that, singer Neil Diamond married music manager Katie McNeil in ahotel garden in front of 225 guests.